Home & Family

I'm trying to decide whether to put my house on the market. I mentioned in a previous post about a cottage I went to see in a neighboring town. I really, really loved the house and I especially love the location and so have been thinking very hard about whether it may be possible to buy it. Of course the biggest variable is whether I can sell MY house. It's such a crummy market (which of course is a big reason why buying the house is even a possibility) that I really have had no confidence in whether it's even worth trying. I had the realtor out anyway. She looked around and then did a market analysis, checked out the comps and came back last night to go over everything with me. So, apparently some places nearby have sold over the past four months or so for some pretty decent amounts. It surprised me a bit. Of course it's all a crap-shoot, but I honestly wasn't expecting the news to be that good. I just assumed that the expected sale price would be so low that I wouldn't even want to consider it. So now I have some hard decisions to make. Do I really want to go through all this and so soon again (I only just moved about two years ago). It's a lovely little cottage. I just love the town and the specific location, the house is charming and it would be so wonderful to have some extra property! Being down the road from wooded trails for running would be unbelievably fantastic and being so close to the riding barn would be a dream come true. But ... GAH! I am exhausted and overwhelmed just thinking about it all. Anyway, so the realtor left her research with me. Now it's time to think about it and decide what I want to do.

I was speaking to my father on the phone last night and he was telling me that my brother is experiencing some pretty hard times. My brother basically went off to college in South Carolina years ago, flunked out after a semester or two and never came back. At this stage he might as well have been born somewhere in the South, forget that we all grew up in New Jersey! Anyway, I don't talk to my brother at all really, mostly because he is pretty much the World's worst communicator. I can email him, send him birthday cards & checks, Christmas presents, whatever 'til I'm blue in the face and I'll never get any kind of a response from him. I don't dislike him. I don't hate him. In person we get along fine, he just doesn't do email or phone calls or whatever. I think he's also a bit like me, just sort of adrift from having a family. Really has made his friends more his family than his biological one.

Anyway, so he lives in Charlotte, NC where the economy is apparently particularly bad. Charlotte is one of those places that grew up very quickly, real estate sky-rocketed over the course of a few years, companies & banks have big corporate centers there that did a lot of growing and hiring over a short period of time. Anyway, I guess it's all crashing now. My brother had a floor refinishing business with a friend and the business has completely dried up. He's scrambling to get a job, but apparently McDonald's isn't even hiring (well, I guess he interviewed at McD's, but hasn't heard yet). Things are pretty bad. So I thought overnight about it and it occurred to me that maybe he would come up here, at least for a couple of weeks. I have some stuff (painting some rooms, fixing some stuff, hanging some stuff, whatever) that I need to have done around the house and I would rather pay him than some stranger, if he's willing. It also might give him the opportunity to check out New Hampshire, who knows? Maybe he wouldn't mind relocating here, if he could find a job. It's got to be better than what he's experiencing where he is anyway. Well, it's just a thought. I'm going to email him about it tomorrow. Of course, being the World's Worst Communicator, I'm sure he'll never respond, but it's worth a shot anyway.